With Friends Like These …

By Christopher Shea

A sacred banyan tree in Bali. (Getty)

It’s hardly a news flash that someone thinks the so-called New Atheists have a “narrow worldview,” as the headline atop this essay asserts. But the particular attack here is so idiosyncratic that it’s difficult to imagine anyone reading it and concluding: Yes, my beliefs have been validated!

Hard-core secular rationalists will likely feel as though their heads are exploding; Christians may feel slighted; and even animists of the developing world, on whose behalf Professor Stephen T. Asma especially wishes to speak, may feel condescended to.

Where to begin? Asma begins with the charge that Harris et. al. think that “religion is mostly concerned with two jobs—explaining nature and guiding morality.” Asma quickly concedes that “science” performs these roles better (a rather controversial claim where morality is concerned! Though he doesn’t spend much time on it). But he adds that the New Atheists fail to appreciate an additional role played by religion: offering consolation and a sense of well-being:

Buddhism, for example, is about finding a form of psychological happiness that goes beyond the usual pursuit of fleeting pleasures. With introspection and discipline, Buddhism and other contemplative traditions attempt to find a state of well-being that is outside the usual game of desire fulfillment.

What’s odd about that—as well as Asma’s later claim that he has “insert[ed] Buddhism into the discussion”—is that Harris’s book dwells at extraordinary length on Buddhism, such length that he wound up annoying some fellow atheists, who thought he’d gone soft for Asian religion. Still, Asma argues that the New Atheists seek to strip away the parts of Buddhism that are “elaborate, supernatural, [and] devotional.” Yes, that’s probably true.

But here’s where the ride really gets choppy, for Asma proposes a “radical argument”:

Not only should the more rational and therapeutic elements be distilled from the opiate of religion. But the wacky, superstitious, cloud-cuckoo-land forms of religion, too, should be cherished and preserved, for those forms of religion sometimes do great good for our emotional lives, even when they compromise our more-rational lives.

Even the wacky? In defending this position, he mostly bypasses the three great monotheisms to focus on Cambodian believers in teak na, spirits that are thought to inhabit homes, trees, rivers, and roads. Cambodians make offerings to these spirits, to propitiate them; life’s misfortunes are blamed on their wrath. And Asma argues that in a part of the world where life can by nasty and brutish such a worldview “literally makes more sense” than the secular-scientific view. It makes more sense, too, than monotheism plus science, which he lumps together with scientific atheism as a Western luxury:

In that [Cambodian] world … It makes more sense to say that a spiteful spirit is bringing one misery, or that a benevolent ghost is granting favor, than to say that seamless neutral and predictable laws of nature are unfolding according to some invisible logic. Unless you could demonstrate the real advantages of an impersonal, lawful view of nature (e.g., by having a long-term, well-financed medical facility in the village), you will never have the experiential data to overcome animism. Our first-world claim about neutral, predictable laws will be an inferior causal theory for explaining the chaos of everyday third-world life.

(If you did build that medical facility, what happens to Asma’s claim about the truth-value of animism? How much hinges on that not-exactly-impossible-to-envision counterfactual?)

For his part, back in the wealthy United States, Asma says he has found himself praying in dark moments—to whom?—though he thinks prayer causes nothing to happen. “But when people have their backs against the wall,” he writes, “when they are truly helpless and hopeless, then groveling and negotiating with anything more powerful than themselves is a very human response.”

So: are there any believers out there—whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, or animist—who find this defense of faith to mesh with how you view your own: wacky and inefficacious, but psychologically necessary? Cloud-cuckoo but human? I’m finding it hard to imagine.

Comments (2 of 2)

"Asma begins with the charge that Harris et. al. think that “religion is mostly concerned with two jobs—explaining nature and guiding morality.” Asma quickly concedes that “science” performs these roles better (a rather controversial claim where morality is concerned! "

This isn't controversial at all among thinking people. Which of our moral convictions is grounded strictly in religious teachings? Do you honestly suppose that, picking on Christianity here for the sake of argument, before Moses came down from the mountain the Jews had been wandering the desert murdering, lying and stealing? (Let us not forget that God then sends them murdering lying and stealing their way through the fertile crescent for a couple thousand years. Don't do any of the things on this list... EVER... unless I order you to... which will probably be quite often.)

I submit that our ancestors would not have left the safety of the trees but for the development of our moral character. Indeed, you can see hints of empathy, compassion and love among several mammal species, especially among primates. The rise and progress of moral thought is far better explained through the evolutionary model, aka science, than by any religious ideology.